President Trump Should Be Afraid of This Climate Change Report

Scientists at 13 federal agencies have released a landmark report detailing how man-made climate change is happening and how we're already feeling its effects. The average temperature "has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980" in the U.S., the report tells us via The New York Times, "and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years." The document determines that the evidence is overwhelming, based on "thousands of studies, conducted by tens of thousands of scientists," that human activity, specifically the emission of "greenhouse (heat-trapping) gasses," is primarily responsible for the changes occurring in our climate.

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And we know all this because scientists chose to leak a draft of the report out of fear that the Trump administration would suppress it.

One government scientist who worked on the report, Katharine Hayhoe, a professor of political science at Texas Tech University, called the conclusions among "the most comprehensive climate science reports" to be published. Another scientist involved in the process, who spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity, said he and others were concerned that it would be suppressed.

There's good reason for that concern: Just this week, The Guardianreported that staffers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture were told to censor the term "climate change" in their work. Instead, they were to use "weather extremes." Other blacklisted terms, according to department emails obtained by the newspaper? "Reduce greenhouse gasses," "sequester carbon," and "climate change adaptation." This is similar to a report in Politicofrom March, which indicated the Department of Energy's international climate office had instructed staff not to use "climate change," "emissions reduction," or "Paris Agreement" in "memos, briefings, or other written communication." This all seems to be based in part on the model laid out by Republican Governor Rick Scott's administration in Florida, a state whose biggest city is already flooding at high tide. Because nothing says The Facts Are On Our Side like banning all discussion of a topic.

All this is a symptom of the psychosis that has thoroughly infected the Republican Party on this issue. It is the only major political party in the developed world that disputes the scientific consensus on man-made climate change, and certainly the only one featuring a senior official who would throw a snowball on the floor of the nation's highest legislative chamber to demonstrate a planetary phenomenon is not happening.

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It also features someone like Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan, who said that if climate turns out to be a problem, God will take care of it.

Walberg's position might be an insane interpretation of scripture, or at least just insane. But it is also, as one constituent demonstrated at a subsequent town hall—despite what we now know was a typical attempt to suppress the discussion—the product of certain incentives created for the congressman by our campaign finance system:

The questioner is correct here that Walberg has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from energy companies and the Club for Growth—a group closely tied to the Koch Brothers—throughout his career, at least according to OpenSecrets. And that's just what's publicly reported. In the new era of dark money and the anarcho-capitalist funding of political campaigns, sums far larger can be secretly funneled through 501(c)3 organizations and Super PACs into congressional campaign coffers by people and organizations who make money putting carbon in the atmosphere. This would seem to indicate Walberg's faith that this whole thing will sort itself out—so we don't have to do anything that might endanger fossil fuel profits—is less Biblical than it is self-promotion and -preservation.

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That's a familiar theme among the climate-denying radicals that dominate one of our two major political parties. That guy with the clever snowball trick? That's James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma and member of the Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works. He has taken more than $1.8 million from oil and gas companies, again according to OpenSecrets. And again, that's only the money that had to be publicly disclosed. In the executive branch, from which this new study was leaked, things aren't much better. For one, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt has a long history of devoting his time in government almost exclusively to protecting and maximizing the profits of fossil fuel companies. That includes an episode from his time as attorney general of Oklahoma in which he received a letter of complaint about a new EPA policy from a local energy company, pasted his letterhead at the top of it, and sent it on to the EPA as official correspondence from a state's chief legal administrator. This is the guy now tasked with protecting the environment.

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In the end, all this clever maneuvering from Republicans in government and the wealthy interests who put them there won't matter much to the planet. Earth is, after all, 4 billion years old, and will survive the human race like it outlived the dinosaurs and so much else. The question is how long we would like to stay, because the planet isn't in danger—we are.

According to the new report, even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gasses today, the world's average temperature would still rise by half a degree this century, locking us into the 2 degrees celsius change that scientists fear could have catastrophic effects on our environment's suitability for human life. Temperatures are melting at the Arctic and Antarctic poles twice as fast as anywhere else, fueling fears of a feedback loop due to fast-melting ice caps. The report details how even small increases in temperature can lead to drastically longer heat waves, more intense storms, and the more rapid collapse of coral reefs, which are a lifeblood of our oceans—which, in turn, supply food for a huge number of the world's people. The report also breaks new ground in the field of "attribution science," declaring for one of the first times that some of the extreme weather we've seen in recent years is attributable to climate change. That includes "relatively strong evidence" that it contributed to the 2003 European heat wave, which killed 35,000 people.

The planet isn't in danger—we are.

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Under leadership by a proudly ignorant and incurious man who once said global warming was "a hoax created by the Chinese," the White House has shirked the United States' international commitments and hindered all efforts to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas we are pumping into the atmosphere. That culminated with Trump's abandonment of the Paris Climate Accords, drenching it in a sea of falsehoods, misrepresentations, and contradictory claims. He made the announcement in the White House Rose Garden, surrounded by a rich ecosystem of plant life that for now keeps blooming.

The Republican Party has lost its mind, but it's money and power that sent it over the ledge. Will we all go over with it?

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